As you still struggle to come to grips with the endless pile of laundry from last year, a Japanese company may just have saved you from drowning in a sea of clutter as it revealed the world's first laundry-folding robot at the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Integrated with image analysis, AI and robotics as its core technology, this refrigerator-sized device - monickered 'Laundroid' - not only washes and dries clothes, but also folds them, potentially replacing the ubiquitous washing machines at homes.

"We wanted to introduce a technology that never existed before and create ways to make life simpler through innovation," said the head of Seven Dreamers Laboratories, Shin Sakane in an interview to Bloomberg last year. Laundroid uses image recognition technology to identify different items and then sorts them according to the type of garment or who they belong to.

The company has made it possible to automate an entire gamut of activities associated with this universally hated chore. Users simply need to load their washed and dried laundry into a box and Laundroid will automatically fold them using sliding plates and neatly stack them on shelves located above.

According to his interaction with Bloomberg, Sakane says that each item takes about 10 minutes to fold, which is the time necessary to scan each part of the clothing and communicate via Wi-Fi with a central server. However, users will still be expected to do some tasks, such as partially buttoning shirts and ensuring that the clothes are not inside out.

To launch the bot, Seven Dreamers raised $60 million in Series B funding round led by Panasonic. "We decided that by combining Panasonic’s washing and drying machine technology and 7D’s folding technology, it is possible to bring an all-in-one product to the market early,” said a Panasonic spokesperson to Bloomberg.

While the full product - complete with a washer and dryer - is slated for release only in 2019, an early version that can sort and fold clothing goes on sale worldwide in March this year. Interestingly, this model may cost significantly more due to higher initial production costs, according to a Bloomberg report.

Seven Dreamers is not the only one trying to reinvent washing - a California-based company called FoldiMate claims to take about half a minute to de-wrinkle and fold an item. However, whether or not consumers will latch on to these products for a task they can do away with far economically is for time to tell.